The Honourable Mr. Ancram found himself gratified by Mrs. Church’s refusal to see him in Calcutta. It filled out his idea of her, which was a delicate one, and it gave him a pleasurable suggestive of the stimulus which he should always receive from her in future toward the alternative which was most noble and most satisfying. Mr. Ancram had the clearest perception of the value of such stimulus; but the probability that he was likely to be able to put it permanently at his disposal could hardly be counted chief among the reasons which made him, at this time, so exceedingly happy. His promotion had even less to do with it. India is known to be full of people who would rather be a Chief Commissioner than Rudyard Kipling or Saint Michael, but this translation had been in the straight line of Mr. Ancram’s intention for years; it offered him no fortuitous joy, and if it made a basis for the more refined delight which had entered his experience, that is as much as it can be credited with. Life had hitherto offered him no satisfaction that did not pale beside the prospect of possessing Judith Church. He gave dreamy half-hours to the realisation of how the sordidness of existence would vanish when he should regard it through her eyes, of how her goodness would sweeten the world to him, and her gaiety brighten it, and her beauty etherealise it. He tried to analyse the completeness of their fitness for each other, and invariably gave it up to fall into a little trance of longing and of anticipation.

He could not be sufficiently grateful to John Church for dying—it was a circumstance upon which he congratulated himself frankly, an accident by which he was likely to benefit so vastly that he could indulge in no pretence of regretting it on any altruistic ground. It was so decent of Church to take himself out of the way that his former Chief Secretary experienced a change of attitude toward him. Ancram still considered him an ass, but hostility had faded out of the opinion, which, when he mentioned it, dwelt rather upon that animal’s power of endurance and other excellent qualities. Ancram felt himself distinctly on better terms with the late Lieutenant-Governor, and his feeling was accented by the fact that John Church died in time to avoid the necessity for a more formal resignation. His Chief Secretary felt personally indebted to him for that, on ethical grounds.

In the long, suggestive, caressing letters which reached Judith by every mail, he made an appearance of respecting her fresh widowhood that was really clever, considering the fervency which he contrived to imply. As the weeks went by, however, he began to consider this attitude of hers, the note she had struck in going six thousand miles away without seeing him, rather an extravagant gratification of conscience, and if she had been nearer it may be doubted whether his tolerance would have lasted. But she was in London and he was in Assam, which made restraint easier; and he was able always to send her the assurance of his waiting passion without hurting her with open talk of the day when he should come into his own. Judith, seeing that his pen was in a leash, watered her love anew with the thought of his innate nobility, and shortened the time that lay between them.

In spite of her conscience, which was a good one, there were times when Mrs. Church was shocked by the realisation that she was only trying to believe herself unhappy. In spite of other things, too, of a more material sort. Misfortune had overtaken the family at Stoneborough: ill-health had compelled her father to resign the pulpit of Beulah Church, and to retire upon a microscopic stipend from the superannuation fund. There was a boy of fourteen, much like his sister, who wanted to be a soldier, and did not want to wear a dirty apron and sell the currants of the leading member of his father’s congregation. For these reasons Judith’s three hundred a year shrank to a scanty hundred and fifty. The boy went to Clifton, and she to an attic in that south side of Kensington where they are astonishingly cheap. Here she established herself, and grew familiar with the devices of poverty. It was not picturesque Bohemian poverty; she had little ladylike ideals in gloves and shoes that she pinched herself otherwise to attain, and it is to be feared that she preferred looking shabby-genteel with eternal limitations to looking disreputable with spasmodic extravagances. But neither the sordidness of her life nor the discomfort she tried to conjure out of the past made her miserable. Rather she extracted a solace from them—they gave her a vague feeling of expiation; she hugged her little miseries for their purgatorial qualities, and felt, though she never put it into a definite thought, that they made a sort of justification for her hope of heaven.

Besides, except once a week, on Indian mail day, her life was for the time in abeyance. She had a curious sense occasionally, in some sordid situation to which she was driven for the lack of five shillings, of how little anything mattered during this little colourless period; and she declined kindly invitations from old Anglo-Indian acquaintances in more expensive parts of Kensington with almost an ironical appreciation of their inconsequence. She accepted existence without movement or charm for the time, since she could not dispense with it altogether. She invented little monotonous duties and occupied herself with themthem, and waited, always with the knowledge that just beyond her dingy horizon lay a world, her old world, of full life and vivid colour and long dramatic days, if she chose to look.

On mail days she did look, over Ancram’s luxurious pages with soft eyes and a little participating smile. They made magic carpets for her—they had imaginative touches. They took her to the scent of the food-stuff in the chaffering bazar; she saw the white hot sunlight sharp-shadowed by dusty palms, and the people, with their gentle ways and their simplicity of guile, the clanking silver anklets of the coolie women, the black kol smudges under the babies’ eye-lashes—the dear people! She remembered how she had seen the oxen treading out the corn in the warm leisure of that country, and the women grinding at the mill. She remembered their simple talk; how the gardener had told her in his own tongue that the flowers ate much earth; how a syce had once handed her a beautiful bazar-written letter, in which he asked for more wages because he could not afford himself. She remembered the jewelled Rajahs, and the ragged magicians, and the coolies’ song in the evening, and the home-trotting little oxen painted in pink spots in honour of a plaster goddess, and realised how she loved India. She realised it even more completely, perhaps, when November came and brought fogs which were always dreary in that they interfered with nothing that she wanted to do, and neuralgia that was especially hard to bear for being her only occupation. The winter dragged itself away. Beside Ancram’s letters and her joy in answering them, she had one experience of pleasure keen enough to make it an episode. She found it in the Athenian, which she picked up on a news-stall, where she had dropped into the class of customers who glance over three or four weeklies and buy one or two. It was a review, a review of length and breadth and weight and density, of the second volume of the “Modern Influence of the Vedic Books,” by Lewis Ancram, I.C.S. She bought the paper and took it home, and all that day her heart beat higher with her woman’s ambition for the man she loved, sweetened with the knowledge that his own had become as nothing to the man who loved her.